Thread by @mattsheffield

Charlie Kirk's audience member who asked "when do we get to use the guns" is the natural consequence of GOP elites' violent rhetoric.

A thread about @MatthewBoedy's latest essay for @DiscoverFlux:

flux.community/matthew-boedy/…

Here's the video in case you haven't seen it yet:

The fact that Charlie Kirk, the leader of a Christian nationalist youth group, would be asked about when the time would come for right-wingers to begin killing people has been linked to Trump's sore-loser lies about 2020.

Unfortunately, this tradition of violence is much older.

For the very beginning of the far-right movement that calls itself American conservatism, GOP politicians have used violent language in their campaign materials and speeches, constantly speaking of "fighting tyranny" or how "extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice."

Much of this rhetoric originates from and feeds into the "gun culture" that has been deliberately cultivated by the NRA and other gun advocacy groups as a way to turn tools into an identity, a way of transforming popular and common-sense regulations into existential threats.

Even while millionaire liars like Tucker Carlson try to portray the Capitol invasion of January 6 as the work of "infiltrators," the right-wing base understands completely that their ideological compatriots were the ones who stormed the Capitol.

Read the comments at Breitbart or other RW sites & you'll easily find people longing to take arms for mass killings of "libtards" and other supposed servants of Satan.

This is the culture Kirk et al. have deliberately created, despite their pretensions to oppose violence /end